Two of the bad boys of female boardroom representation have emerged as the best recruiters of women directors over the past four years — yet Britain’s top companies must do better on boardroom gender imbalance or they will face interference from Brussels, Vince Cable has warned.
Between 2012 and 2014, Old Mutual, the London-listed South African financial services group, appointed five women to its board, including Ingrid Johnson, a 48-year-old executive from its Nedbank subsidiary, who became finance director last summer. Five of its thirteen directors are now women.
Aggreko, which like Old

Students who want a good job should think carefully before choosing arts
degrees, Britain’s top bosses have said.
Speaking before tomorrow’s £1 million Queen Elizabeth prize for engineering,
the heads of some of the biggest firms said not enough emphasis was placed
on employability when advising students about educational choices.
“We have just allowed people to study what they want to study, which is very
nice, but at the end they wonder what the job opportunities are,” said
Juergen Maier, chief executive of Siemens UK.
“We need roughly double the number of school leaver

The number of graduates has recovered to reach a record high, with employers
facing increasing competition to hire university leavers. Employers expect
to raise their recruitment budgets in the coming year and create almost 12
per cent more fast-track jobs for graduates.
Recruitment figures for the fiercely competitive graduate jobs market have
bounced back to levels comparable with 2007 — before the financial crash —
with posts remaining unfilled.
A common reason for such vacancies was that applicants who were offered a job
pulled out late to take a more attractive posi

Teenagers who have spent hours crafting their CVs as they seek that elusive first job had better look away now.
Employers spend on average less than nine seconds scanning a candidate’s CV before moving on to the next, due to the huge volume of applications per vacancy.
One expert likened the process to the casual dating app Tinder, renowned for the speed at which users scroll through profiles before they find one — or more — they like.
The findings are based on a survey of 500 employers by OnePoll last month for National Citizen Service, a volunteering programme run by charities and others an

Half of all those approaching retirement intend to carry on working when they reach their mid-sixties, according to the government’s older workers champion.
Ros Altmann said a national study suggested that in the next few years the number of over-65s still working could quadruple from 1.2 million to 4.8 million.
Almost all of the over-50s who planned to continue working sought part-time roles so they could ease themselves into retirement rather than suddenly stopping work altogether.
Ms Altmann said that employers’ attitudes would have to change, with training for older workers imperative so

Bus drivers are the most likely to suffer depression while coalminers and road menders are the workers with the lowest rates of the illness, research suggests.
The academic study found that plenty of physical toil and avoiding the general public were the best strategies to avoid becoming depressed. It revealed that some career choices were linked with much higher rates of depression than others.
Bus drivers, estate agents and social workers were among those most likely to suffer depression, perhaps because of the abuse they received in their line of work. Those employed in manufacturing, lega